I had planned to go home for Christmas of 1990. Even though my car was on its last legs, I felt like there was enough juice for it to drive all the way from Denver to Artesia. Mom and Dad were going to give me a used car for Christmas.
I had also planned to see Chez on the way down. We had been keeping in contact the last few months, but this would be the first time we would have seen each other face to face to try to be boyfriend/girlfriend. A lot had changed since I just barely missed her moving out of her parents' house earlier in the year. Not long after we re-connected, she moved back in with her parents.
One time, her end of the conversation got rather sexually charged. She said, "Fayd! I want to f*** your brains out!" I was taken aback by this. She'd never talked this way before. I told her I had the feeling that she had been having sex. She denied it. (It wouldn't have bothered me if she was having sex. I just wanted her to tell me the truth. I would find that truth out later.)
Sometime after that, she enrolled in Job Corps. When I visited her in Roswell before I moved to Denver, she and her siblings used to badmouth the Job Corps students, who were situated in their neighborhood at the old Air Force Base. It was amusing to know that she had become one of them.
A couple of days before I was supposed to leave for Artesia, we got a pretty bad snowstorm. It got so cold, my car wouldn't start. In addition, I needed to change one of the tires, but I wasn't able to remove the lugnuts myself. I decided to call AAA. When the weather is really bad, the AAA phone service will warn you that it will take up to 48 hours for someone to respond, unless it's a life or death emergency. Since I didn't need to leave for a couple of days, I put in my request and left my home and work numbers for them to call when someone was going to be at my house. I requested a jump start and a tire change.
About 36 hours later, they called me at work. I was able to run out to my apartment. When I got there, I saw that the AAA guy was just in a pickup truck. That meant he didn't have the pneumatic equipment needed to change the tire. All he could do was jump start the car. I would have to wait another 48 hours for them to send someone else to change the tire. We got the car started. It was working okay, but I knew I couldn't drive home with that one bad tire. (And I didn't want to have to pay someone to change it. Yes, it would have only cost five dollars, but I didn't have kind of money back then.)
I was left with one option to go home. I had to take Greyhound. I'd never been to the bus station in Downtown Denver before. I'd walked past it several times because it's on the 16th Street Mall, but I never needed to go inside. I called for the bus schedule. There was a bus that left at 3:30pm on the 23rd. It went all the way to Amarillo, TX. It was scheduled to arrive around 4am the next morning. Then, there would a bus going to Roswell leaving at 4:20am. I would arrive in Roswell around 7:00am. (Keep in mind there's a one hour time zone difference between New Mexico and Texas.)
I went to the bus station two hours early and bought a ticket. There were a lot of people already lined up to take the bus. I just got in line and waited. During this time, a blind man came up to someone in the line and asked which bus we were waiting for. For whatever reason, the person he was talking to wasn't giving him a straight answer and actually pointed him toward the restroom (Yes, he pointed). The blind man started screaming about how he missed the last bus because of that nonsense and he wasn't about to miss this bus. I was surprised that Greyhound didn't offer any kind of service to assist the visually-impaired to ensure he got on the bus.
Since it was a busy holiday season, Greyhound actually scheduled two buses to take the same route. I got on the first bus. It was completely packed. We left the station. There was a family in the back of the bus. One of the children started getting sick and went into the bathroom to vomit. We were getting on the ramp to I-25 when the bus driver pulled over and went to the back. He asked the family if he needed to turn the bus back around. The father said everything was fine, so we got on our way. The bus driver later asked on the PA if anyone had brought any soda like Sprite or Mountain Dew to help the boy's stomach settle. I don't think anyone volunteered their soda.
The boy kept having to go to the bathroom to throw up. He couldn't keep anything down, not even water. Nobody on the bus could use the bathroom because of that. Fortunately, we stopped at a few places along the way, including a McDonald's, where we all had to get off the bus and get something to eat while the bus driver took a break. We were running WAY behind and I only had a 20 minute window of opportunity to get on the connecting bus to Roswell. I asked the bus driver what the chances were that EVERY Greyhound bus in the country were running behind schedule that night. He told me not to worry about it. We would get to Amarillo in time.
I couldn't sleep the rest of the way. For that matter, no one else could, either. The boy in the back kept groaning. We finally made it to Amarillo. We all got off the bus. I ran around the station and tried to find out if the bus to Roswell had left yet. When I got to customer service, the father was there yelling at an employee, trying to get him to tell him where they could go check into a motel because they just were not going to be able to handle being on the bus anymore. While I was waiting there for them to assist him, I heard an announcement that the bus to Roswell was boarding. I breathed a sigh of relief and went outside.
There were maybe 20 people on the bus, a nice break from the overstuffed bus I had been on for the last 12 hours. I was able to get some sleep. I remember waking up as we were driving through Clovis. I thought about the two years that I had lived there and how glad I was to be living in Denver.
My Dad and Loyd met me at the bus station in Roswell. We went out and got some breakfast before driving back to Artesia. They took me to Mom's house. I just got into bed and slept for the next six hours.
This would not be the only thing that made this holiday unusual. I'll get to that tomorrow.
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